Category Archives: Agile Management

An article called Are You Ready for the Agile Future presents a brief discussion about the role of HR in an agile organization. There are several very good ideas. The basic idea is that the HR function must adapt to the nature of agility. This in turn means, for example, hiring people that are agile, nimble, adaptable etc.

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Queues of work form at three types of levels in an agile organization.

At the largest level is the project portfolio. The queue for this level contains all the projects that are not yet being actively worked upon by project teams.

At the intermediate level is the backlog of project functionality. The queue for this level contains packages of business function or infrastructure components necessary to implement business function. These packages are selected by a project team to fit into a single iteration.

The packages in turn are also elements in a queue. This smallest level of queue contains individual tasks required to implement all the business function and infrastructure that make up a selected package of work. The team members select tasks off this queue based on priority and dependencies.

In many agile methods, the queue management approach is fairly explicit at the intermediate and small levels. However, very little is said about the largest level. Some organizations have solved this by limiting the size of projects:

To be successful, high-tech CIOs recommend biting off projects in small chunks…. Gregoire notes that Dell is growing so fast that at the end of an 18-month project, the company would be significantly different from when it began. “A project has to take less than six months [to complete]. That’s the only way we can make sure [it stays] with the business,” he says. (http://www.cio.com/archive/120198/tech.html)

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What I am trying to do is say that something important really is happening. The value-creation model is moving away from a vertical silo model to an increasingly collaborative horizontal model, from command and control to collaborate and connect, and that’s going to change everything.

This comment alone is a fairly close hit at the essense of Agile Work. The rest of the article is very interesting and touches on many topics of interest relating to globalization, business, information technology, outsourcing and politics.

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